Book Descriptions
for The Love Curse of the Rumbaughs by Jack Gantos
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
How can love be a curse? “I am a young woman now, but when I was seven years old, something unexpected happened that changed my life forever.” It is not until she turns sixteen that Ivy fully understands the implications of what she saw in the basement of the Rumbaugh’s pharmacy—run by the identical, seventy-plus-year-old Rumbaugh twins—when she was seven. She’d known the Rumbaughs were taxidermists. Still, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the twins’ mother, perfectly preserved and stuffed. That discovery is the first of many disturbing revelations in a novel that challenges readers to consider ideas such as nature versus nuture, fate versus free will, and the ethics of eugenics, not to mention female psychosocial development. All of these themes intersect in the Rumbaugh family curse, in which children fall so head over heels in love with their mothers that they can’t bear to ever be parted from them. Ivy, it turns out, is a Rumbaugh. And Rumbaugh’s take it all in stride. Constantly teetering between the hilarious and the macabre, Jack Gantos offers teens an unsettling, provocative tale. (Age 14 and older)
CCBC Choices 2007 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2007. Used with permission.
From the Publisher
On an unseasonably warm Easter Sunday, a young girl named
Ivy discovers a chilling secret in the basement of the Rumbaugh
pharmacy across the street from the hotel where she lives with
her mother. The discovery reveals a disturbing side to the
eccentric lives of family friends Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh,
known throughout their small western Pennsylvania town
simply as the Twins. It seems that Ab and Dolph have been
compelled by a powerful mutual love for their deceased mother
to do something extraordinary, something that in its own
twisted way bridges the gap between the living and the dead.
Immediately, Ivy's discovery provokes the revelation of a
Rumbaugh family curse, a curse that, as Ivy will learn over the
coming years, holds a strange power over herself and her own
mother.
In his third book for young adults, Jack Gantos has scripted a
completely original drama. With gothic flavor and black humor,
he depicts a group of people bound together by love,
compulsion . . . and a passion for taxidermy.
Ivy discovers a chilling secret in the basement of the Rumbaugh
pharmacy across the street from the hotel where she lives with
her mother. The discovery reveals a disturbing side to the
eccentric lives of family friends Abner and Adolph Rumbaugh,
known throughout their small western Pennsylvania town
simply as the Twins. It seems that Ab and Dolph have been
compelled by a powerful mutual love for their deceased mother
to do something extraordinary, something that in its own
twisted way bridges the gap between the living and the dead.
Immediately, Ivy's discovery provokes the revelation of a
Rumbaugh family curse, a curse that, as Ivy will learn over the
coming years, holds a strange power over herself and her own
mother.
In his third book for young adults, Jack Gantos has scripted a
completely original drama. With gothic flavor and black humor,
he depicts a group of people bound together by love,
compulsion . . . and a passion for taxidermy.
Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.
